She sighs and places her hands in her lap. “No one apart from my husband knows this. Not even Jack. But it’s the truth.”
I nod, not quite knowing what to say, other than why are you here? On Wilde’s Farm? You look like a bumblebee on a glacier. Where’s Jack? Is he okay?
“I met Mr. Alden when I worked at Saks.” She pulls in a breath like she’s just confessed to a murder and it’s taking everything in her to say the words. “I sold small leather goods. Gloves. Wallets. Glasses cases. That sort of thing. He came in looking for a pair of gloves for his mother.”
For some reason, I’d expected Mrs. Alden to have been from a wealthy New York family. But apparently she was a sales assistant.
“You have an excellent poker face,” she says.
“I’m not trying to hide any reactions. I’m just trying to listen to your story.”
She nods slowly. “Well, we were instantly taken with each other. James wined and dined me. Took me dancing. But always back where I lived in New Jersey. As our relationship progressed, I came to know who he was, and what the expectations of his family were for his future wife.”
This sounds like a familiar story. If she was here to warn me not to get involved with her son, she’s way too late. He’s gone. “You know Jack and I are no longer together?” I ask her.
She ignores me. “But Mr. Alden and I were in love, and we wanted to be together. Back in those days, the people who fit into New York society were more easily identifiable. Deportment. Conversation. Clothes, hair, nails. Everything told a story.”
I glance down self-consciously at my unmanicured nails.
“Things were less fluid then. People didn’t cross the class barrier so easily as they do now.” She sighs. “Anyway, I knew I wanted to be with Mr. Alden—James. And he wanted to be with me. But we both knew his family wouldn’t approve. So we concocted a story about my background. About how I was from an upper-class family in England, but I’d come to New York for summers and was living with some friends of the family.
“James arranged for a close friend of his to open their doors to me, and I moved from my parents’ house in New Jersey toManhattan. James taught me how to make small talk. How to walk. He even paid for some lessons to help me speak with a hint of a British accent. He taught me to dance, and we went to dinners that doubled as lessons in social etiquette. It was quite the marathon year of preparation.”
“You spent a year doing all this?”
“A year of meeting in secret, preparing to be introduced to his family.”
Jack has always described his mother as being a complete snob. How is that possible when she’d come from such humble beginnings? She’s a total hypocrite. She must have suspected how Jack and I felt about each other, but it never mattered to her.
I press my lips into a thin line, not wanting to be rude to someone in my father’s house. If this wasmyhouse, I would have asked her to leave already.
“We had a cover story for everything. And when we felt we’d covered every base, James arranged for me to meet his parents at a society wedding. Then again at a charity ball. And for a third time after he’d proposed.”
“Did they approve of the marriage?”
She frowns slightly. “They had wanted him to marry someone else, but they accepted his choice.”
“Good of them.”
“It had taken a lot of work to turn me into a woman they would accept.”
I sigh, irritation prickling at the back of my neck. Why is she telling me all of this? Did she miss the part where I told her Jack and I had broken up?
“Did they ever find out that you weren’t who you said you were?” I ask a little provocatively. “That you’re not who you say you are?” She’d just confessed to being a liar.
She shakes her head. “No. As I said, no one knows apart from me and James now that my parents have passed. And now you.”
Jack doesn’t know. “You lied to your own son?”
“To protect him.” She pulls in a breath. “To protect the Alden name, the Alden legacy and Jack’s future.”
“You think anyone would care? Now? You talk as if the Aldens are royalty and you have to maintain some kind of bloodline.”
Her expression remains neutral. Probably something she learned during that year of preparation.
“I love my husband very deeply and this is what he wanted. He wanted us to be married, and he knew his family would never accept who I really was. So we created someone.”
I can’t imagine the kind of pressure that would lead to two people lying to everyone they cared about in order to be together. It must have almost broken them. It’s awful. And I know it’s a pressure Jack also feels.
